Towards the end of the early medieval private charter

In the unique corpus of early medieval original charters from the former abbey of St Gall (Switzerland), the transition from the Carolingian to post-Carolingian period is marked by a significant break. While more than 700 private charters have survived from before 911/12, the production of such documents decreases radically after this date. In the older scholarship, this documentary break, which can also be observed elsewhere, has often been regarded as clear evidence of a far-reaching crisis in late Carolingian period. More recent studies have argued against this pessimistic view, and have tried to formulate more pragmatic interpretations. They have largely focused on the emergence and evidence of early medieval cartularies and their transformation to books of tradition. The proposed project will instead concentrate on the St Gall documents, the only significant corpus of original charters north of the Alps, and it will therefore offer new and alternative evidence. Starting from the later years of the abbacy of Grimald ( 872), when the quantity and quality of the St Gall charter production reached its peak, the project aims to investigate changes in the later 9th and 10th centuries. For this, the applicant can build on the experience obtained by his ongoing work on the facsimile-edition of the St Gall charters (within the series of the Chartae Latinae Antiquiores), which will also be continued in the framework of the proposed project. On the one hand, the project will investigate the remarkable rise of royal diplomas for recipients from Alamannia in the later 9th and 10th centuries and it will analyze their changing contents, functions and significance, but it will also research the changing circumstances of their production, namely, the increase and the making of beneficiary copies, the so-called Empfängerausfertigungen. On the other hand, the project will explore the striking decrease of St Gall private-charters in the same period. It will investigate their changing function in the field of legal transactions and conflict- settlement. It will focus on obvious modifications in the process of their redaction and documentation, and not least in the documents themselves. For this analysis, the originality of the (yet unpublished) St Gall charter corpus of these years is crucial. As the production of the St Gall private charters was dominated, yet not monopolized, by the monks of the abbey at the time, the project will also explore the development of the charter scriptorium of St Gall, its structure and organisation, the number of scribes, their formation and skills and their possible employment in contemporary monastic book-production.

In the unique corpus of early medieval original charters from the former abbey of St Gall, the transition from the Carolingian to post-Carolingian period is marked by a significant break. While more than 700 private charters have survived from before 911/12, the production of such documents decreases radically after this date. In older scholarship, this documentary break, which can also be observed elsewhere, has often been regarded as clear evidence of a far-reaching crisis in the late Carolingian period. More recent studies have argued against this pessimistic view, and have tried to formulate more pragmatic interpretations. The results of the project suggest that the striking decrease of the St Gall charter production, which actually starts already in the later 9th century, was essentially a reduction of the monastic charter production and does not prove a general collapse of literacy in Alamannia. The rising number of important royal charters (donations, privileges, special rights), which were issued for the monastery since the later 9th century, may have influenced the perception and estimation of the small-scaled, day-to-day legal transactions. However, there is no clear evidence for a direct link between the increase of royal diplomas for St Gall and the decrease of the monastic private charters. More importantly, the progressing deterioration of the donations and precariae-grants (with regard to terms and conditions stipulated by the donors) seems to have had a negative influence on the respective charter-production. Indeed, the decrease of the private charters since the later 9th century turns out to be primarily one of precaria/prestaria-charters and donation charters. Furthermore, since the late 9th, but especially in the 10th century the growing number of charters that document property-exchange, but also the obvious shrinking of the abbeys primary zone of manorial interest point towards efforts to concentrate the monastic properties. The decrease of the total number of legal transactions, and especially those dealing with donations and precaria, must be seen in this context, too. This development seems to have been fostered by the political instability and change in the first quarter of the 10th century, when the decrease of royal power, the establishment of a new ducal leadership, but also the incursion of external enemies and other problems challenged the St Gall community. These events had demonstrable negative effects on the manorial estates of the monastery, but, apparently, led also to changes concerning their organization and administration. In this context the growing importance of certain lay people, namely the maiores, but especially the monastic advocatus, is striking. Indeed, the advocate seems to have replaced the monastic prepositi, who had been crucial figures in the administration of the monastic properties and the closely related charter-production until then. While the decrease of the monastic charter-production since the later 9th century seems to have been accelerated by the critical events and developments in the first quarter of the 10th century, administrative changes and the rise of a new type of advocacy were probably the main reasons, why the charter-production was not resumed at a later stage of the 10th century.